Comment: Crossover movies are a desperate sign that a franchise is
running out of ideas, says Anne Billson

And lo, it shall come to pass that, sooner or later, all behemoths face each other on the battlefield. Frankenstein will meet the Wolf Man. Dracula will meet Frankenstein. King Kong will have a showdown against Godzilla. Crossover movies are a sign of End Times (Odin vs the Fenris Wolf, Thor vs the Midgard Serpent), or at least of a franchise that is running out of cards and needs to shuffle in another pack in a desperate bid to hold the audience's attention.

And so, in 2016 (put back from 2015, in order to give the film-makers "time to fully realize their vision"), DC Entertainment will take on mighty Marvel Studios and its ever-expanding universe of industrial accidents by pitting its two biggest superheroes against each other. Batman will meet Superman, just as Freddy met Jason, Jason met Michael Myers, and Alien met Predator before them.

Batman and Superman are different, though. This is not a meeting of monsters or psychokillers (though Superman's behaviour at the end of Man of Steel might raise a few questions there) but of heroes, both nominally on the side of good, albeit occasionally drifting into vigilante territory. It will be the first time they've existed together on screen, though in 1986 they memorably slugged it out on the printed page in Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, a key entry in the rebranding of comic books as posher-sounding "graphic novels".

What kind of motivation will the screenwriters cook up to spur Batters and Supes into fighting each other? Will one of them turn to the dark side? Will it be an Alpha-Male brawl for the favours of Wonder Woman or Lois Lane? And shouldn't we be rooting for Batman anyway, since he's one of us, and Superman is an alien who destroyed half of Metropolis last time he was let out? Or will they simply have a Fast & Furious-type homo-tussle before teaming up against Lex Luthor? Which would be a gigantic cheat since the title itself is promising a Batman vs Superman match of cup final proportions.

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You can be sure of two things, though. The first is that neither character will be killed off, not while there's life in those franchises... not killed off conclusively, anyway. Batman and Superman have both kicked the bucket in comics - but neither stayed dead for long. In superhero movies, it's only non-super friends or loved ones who die permanently (there's about one such casualty per film nowadays), unless of course we're talking about Frigga, all-powerful Norse goddess summarily bumped off in Thor: The Dark World, just to give the hero something to clench his jaw about.

The other thing you can be sure of is that the film will climax with a mighty effects-laden smackdown. An outcome requiring the good guy to vanquish the villain through a display of superior physical force is one of the most predictable aspects of superhero cinema - and also the weakest part of every superhero movie.

Peter Parker can agonise over relationships and responsibilities till the cows come home, but before the running-time is up he will be obliged to engage in whizz-bang fisticuffs with the supervillain du jour. Captain America can uncover conspiracies galore, but in the final furlong it's all about going mano a mano against the bad guys while the film-makers place him in contrived physical jeopardy and pelt him with random explosions. And the Avengers can bicker and quip to their hearts' content, but unless their alliance leads to some sort of superhero reenactment of the Battle of Stalingrad, their fans will feel cheated.

Obviously, while superhero franchises are providing Marvel and DC with licenses to print money, they're not going to mess with the template; the days of films as bizarre and inventive as Batman Returns (three sociopaths in kinky costumes, plus Christopher Walken with Struwwelpeter hair) are well and truly over. There's a reason you don't see a lot of low-budget superhero movies coming out of the indie sector, and so long as the genre is dependent on massive budgets and special effects it'll never evolve beyond Might is Right fantasies in which righteous beefcake beats up the bullies.

Or perhaps it's simply that the superhero movie has yet to meet its John Ford, Anthony Mann or Sam Peckinpah - a film-maker who can elevate the genre, action scenes and all, into something more than just money-making studio product, as each of those directors did for Westerns. Will there ever be a superhero The Searchers or The Wild Bunch?

Some might say Christopher Nolan had already moved into this territory with his Batman trilogy - but though his world-building skills are ambitious and impressive, he falls at the first post by not being very good at directing action. And if you don't believe me, take another look at The Dark Knight car-truck-Batpod chase with the sound turned down - it's a mess. If Ford had directed Stagecoach like that, we'd still be trying to work out who was firing what at who.

But, as Ronald Reagan once said, we have come to a time for choosing. Whose side will you be on in the final showdown? Batman or Superman? Superman or Batman? Or would you like to see the Marvel and DC universes overlap so Hulk could smash them both to a pulp? Or are you suffering from superhero fatigue and wish they'd all just annihilate each other in one big superhero Götterdämmerung?